IntervenSim: Intervention-Aware Social Network Simulation for Opinion Dynamics

TL;DR

IntervenSim is a novel simulation framework that models the continuous co-evolution of social events and interventions, improving accuracy and capturing opinion dynamics more effectively.

Contribution

It introduces an intervention-aware simulation framework that models event evolution and interventions in a closed loop, capturing dynamic social processes.

Findings

IntervenSim reduces MAPE by 41.6% and DTW by 66.9% compared to prior methods.

It achieves more faithful simulation of event trajectories and opinion dynamics.

Fewer agents are needed, lowering computational costs.

Abstract

LLM-based social network simulation introduces a new computational approach for modeling event evolution in complex online environments. However, existing methods typically simulate social processes under a fixed event trajectory, treating the event as static once initialized and overlooking intervention dynamics, and thus fail to capture the intrinsic evolution of real social network events, where source-side interventions and collective interactions continuously reshape event trajectories, sometimes leading to secondary popularity explosions and collective attitude shifts. To address this limitation, we introduce an intervention-aware simulation framework, IntervenSim, that models event evolution and intervention in a closed loop. We model event developments and source-side interventions using source agents, and collective crowd reactions using crowd agents, capturing their continuous co-evolution through an intervention-aware mechanism that couples source-side intervention, group interaction, and feedback-driven adjustment of subsequent interventions. Experiments on diverse real-world events show that IntervenSim improves MAPE by 41.6% and DTW by 66.9% over prior frameworks, while reducing computational cost with fewer yet more capable agents. These improvements indicate that IntervenSim not only simulates regular event trajectories more faithfully, but also better captures opinion dynamics under intervention in complex cases.